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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Especially because in the US we already do this and the sky hasn’t fallen. Storage providers and hosting services already scan for it and popular chat apps block sending matching images client side.

Like everyone saying this is the spiral to dystopia has to contend with the fact that we’re already apparently living in one.

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The sky hasn’t fallen?? Have you read https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... ?

Not the first of such stories either:

https://borncity.com/win/2020/08/16/microsoft-kontensperrung...

This is why I explicitly make on-site backups of anything that's in the cloud and don't store my passwords with Apple. If they suddenly decided I had CSAM for some reason, I'd be locked out of everything.

Google found an image of potential cp, literally a naked child, and forwarded it to the authorities to figure out if it was legit.

Other than the person having their Google account suspended which is a separate issue from the surveillance I see zero issue with the events as they happened. In a bygone era where you had to get photos developed I would have expected the 1 hour photo employee to do the same.

That’s a totally alien idea to me. I grew up in a very nudity-friendly family in Europe and the idea that something as trivial as a naked photograph could occasion such a quasi-disaster is absolutely horrifying.

A photo of a naked child isn’t automatically CP

Which is was forwarded to the police for them to make that determination, do you want the alternative where Google decides?

A lot of Europeans would consider the US fairly dystopian, yes.

The alarm here is because the EU is proposing mandating it, that’s not happened yet in the US.

What? The US doesn't do this. What's the law that mandates scanning chat messages?

I think the US does it without the law. They’re proactive like that

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